Kelly MyersMyer's portrait

Areas of Interest

  • Space, Place, Gender & Power
  • Documentary Film & Representation
  • Conventional (Industrial) Agriculture, Localism, & Environmental Justice

Biography

Kelly Myers is a 2nd year PhD student in the MSU Program in American Studies. She is originally from a family farm in rural commodity corn country, Iowa. She earned both her BA in English and Women's Studies; and MS in Community and Behavioral Health, College of Public Health, at The University of Iowa. Combining these interests, she currently focuses her studies and research in gender, justice, and environmental change through the (inter)disciplines of relational human geography and political ecology, specifically space and place theory and analysis; critical media studies in documentary film; and productivist agriculture, particularly in terms of working with the families, primarily women, of conventional commodity corn production across the CornBelt of the Midwestern US. These foci have and continue to entail the study and implementation of qualitative study designs which incorporate multimodal narrative, oral history, and autoethnography.

Since coming to MSU, Kelly has worked as a Research Aid with the Telecom: Information Studies & Media Grant exploring the decision-making processes of family caregivers to relatives receiving long-term care services. She is currently a Research Assistant with the MSU Oral History Project; Graduate Teaching Assistant of Women in America in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC) department; as well as Program Assistant for the interdisciplinary undergraduate study abroad course across 5 countries in Western Europe, The United States and World War II Europe: Memory and Memorials.